Why are books getting longer?

[MorgulisMaximus]

Back in the old days books were 100 pages long. Even the bulky classics were only a few hundred pages long.  Lord of the rings was a massive book series when it came out. But now its measly 1200 pages is absolutely tiny compared to ASOIAF. Even the children's Harry Potter series is 4200+ pages. 

But it's not just books that are getting longer. Back in the old days TV shows used to be single-story episodes. Today, TV shows have become one continuous story which spans 50+ episodes over many years.

Video games are also getting longer. Skyrim can easily be a 100+ hour game. Witcher 3 is similarly long.

Even movies are getting longer... i.e. if you consider the Marvel movies to be one enormously long story with many character POVs.

Why is everything getting longer?  

[Jo498]

Because people are too lazy to condense/edit and the stuff will sell anyway. And unlike in postwar Britain, paper is cheap.

[Darth Richard II]

Movies used to be 4+ hours with intermissions, so I don't know if the movie argument holds water.

[aceluby]

'Everything' isn't.  These are just some examples of certain aspects of a changing media that is fulfilling an expanding demand for all kinds of wants.  

War and Peace isn't a small book.  Wizard of Oz has like 10 installments.

Gone with the Wind isn't a short movie.

Ongoing stories that span weeks, months, and years have been going on since the radio.

So I can't agree with this premise for most of the media you've cited. 

[Leofric]

Part of the reason for the huge epic fantasy volumes  is Tolkien, he created this huge world and historyin the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion and now everyone else does the same.   Robert E Howard would describe the Kingdoms of Hyboria  in one or two sentences about the  jungles of Kush or the dusky plains of Stygia, and that's all you would get unless the story takes place there.   GRRM is telling you the histories and family trees of every person you meet going back centuries.

[Darth Richard II]

Tolkiens books are short.

[MorgulisMaximus]

2 hours ago, aceluby said:

'Everything' isn't.  These are just some examples of certain aspects of a changing media that is fulfilling an expanding demand for all kinds of wants.  

War and Peace isn't a small book.  Wizard of Oz has like 10 installments.

Gone with the Wind isn't a short movie.

Ongoing stories that span weeks, months, and years have been going on since the radio.

So I can't agree with this premise for most of the media you've cited. 

In 2004, J.J. Abram's "LOST" TV series was one of the very first US series that was one continuous story. These kinds of series existed in other countries but for whatever reason were virtually non-existent in the US. When series were one story they would be known as "mini-series" or something like that.

In recent years, not only have one-story series become the norm but top actors have starred in them.

Matthew McConaughey - True Detective (season 1)

Kevin Spacey - House of Lies

Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris - Westworld (season 1)

Tom Hardy - Taboo

A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable. Big screen actors always felt they were too good to do small screen roles. There just wasn't any enough prestige or money for them to do television series. TV was something for them to look down on, something for lesser actors who couldn't make it to the big screen.

Hence, in a way... television has become the new medium of "Movies". Many top actors now feel that it is the best way to tell a story. 

 

I just did a quick Google search and came up with this headline in The Guardian from 2 years ago:

"Books are steadily increasing in size, according to a survey that has found the average number of pages has grown by 25% over the last 15 years.

A study of more than 2,500 books appearing on New York Times bestseller and notable books lists and Google’s annual survey of the most discussed books reveals that the average length has increased from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014." 

 

[MorgulisMaximus]

Perhaps the invention of flat-screen television plays a role in heralding the current "golden age of television". Flat-screen televisions made it possible to build bigger and bigger screens. Hence narrowing the difference between the movie theater experience and the home theater experience. Also, the price of large flat screen televisions have been steadily dropping in recent years.

[Darth Richard II]

To follow up on that Tolkien comment, I believe at least one of the ASOIAF books is longer than all of LotR put together.

[David Selig]

The reason in the case of books is very obvious - computers and their text editing software. It's just much easier to write, edit, prepare for printing, etc. longer books. And in the case of ebooks large page count is no problem at all in terms of convenience of reading.

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But it's not just books that are getting longer. Back in the old days TV shows used to be single-story episodes. Today, TV shows have become one continuous story which spans 50+ episodes over many years.

Again the reason is obvious - now it's very easy to binge watch a whole season in a weekend and a 5 season series in two weeks with all the streaming/DVD options, and there are also a million recap sites if you have missed an episode or two and want to see what happened. Back in the early days of TV that wasn't the case.

"Today, TV shows have become one continuous story which spans 50+ episodes over many years" is a massive exaggeration anyway. There are still plenty of shows with episodic format which do mostly Mystery of the Week/Monster of the Week plots and plenty of sitcoms with static plots.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Simple. The cost of producing books has been dropping ever since Gutenberg. Printed books were cheaper than getting a monk to transcribe it, until by the eighteenth century, mass-market novels were actually viable (incidentally, in the eighteenth century, novels were considered a low-brow competitor to poetry).

The trend continues today: it's easier to produce a book (with fewer constraints on length) than ever before. That the major publishers have spent decades cutting back on editorial staff at the expense of advertisement is a secondary (and much darker) cause.

[Darth Richard II]

I was always under the impression publishers preferred smaller books, cause stores preferred them because you could put more product on a shelf. Of course ebooks and amazon have probably fucked all that up.

[C Rutherford]

Well you pretty much answered your own question.  In fact in an odd and funny way since you provide as evidence statistics on book length that establishes a strong contender as the reason even as it fails to provide the evidence you claim it does.

To point the claims of book length don't actually show that the length of "books" has increased.  Merely that the length of the most talked about and strongest sellers has.  The survey taps a particular area when all is said and done.  Even if it is a large seeming area it is hardly complete.  After all what constitutes a "book".  On Amazon alone the number of sci/fantasy novels published in a month can include hundreds on hundreds of self published works that often fit in the less than 300 range and many are more of a serial approach and lie in the less than 200 area.  Romance seems to have the same output per month.  And going by those efforts they seem to have a steady market by sales rank and review numbers (even taking into consideration some might be heavy with proxy reviewers)

But I think that survey you provided perhaps holds the real answer already.  Popularity.  If something sells well it makes sense to follow suit with subsequent product.  Television audiences also fit in that category as for sellers a certain brand of desired consumer responds better to protracted and (at least attempted, the success would be subjective) involved programming in regards to plot.

So the real question is why are consumers drawn to media works in the form of fiction and television that at least attempts to be more engaging in detail and scope as well as demanding a longer retention of story particulars?   Do they want a greater investment with a greater sense of return with such plots? Is there a greater demand for more immersive and imaginative complexity due to social and environmental changes? 

It is interesting because certain forms hold true in opposite regard.  The most popular sitcoms don't seem to put much effort into maintaining running storylines.   In fact some of the sitcom darlings often get slammed by their own fans for the lack of continuity in terms of characters and even plot points.  When I was on the local library board, we actually had a program that cataloged our books by various methods and page count was oddly in them.  Our library system serves a little over a quarter of a million and has a still healthy array of benefices awarded over the years and we get roughly roughly a thousand fictional titles a year.  Pretty much the entire hardcover list of the major publishers and a strong selection of trade and even mass market or lately ebooks.  the page count actually dropped in NYT bestsellers.  From 389 pages average to 322.  So I'm interested in the most talked about category in your survey since that could skew pretty strongly.  Despite being a show, I'll use it as an analogy as to how buzz can drown out actual rate of interest.  Mad Men was a critical darling and was a show that for three years running was one of the most articled shows in major media according to the New York Times.  and yet was a piddling show audience wise in the scheme of things. 

Tons of people might talk and buzz about Martin's books due to the show's popularity and its pop culture focus.  Those books alone could tilt the scales of a survey in terms of discussion articles online in forums such as Goodreads.  But ti does not actually mean that more people are reading them or that it is due to their length.  Or causing the people who have read them to jump into other longer books than they usually read.  For some it might.  But I'm not sure we have anything that makes it a prevailing trend.

 

[Darth Richard II]

edit: derp derp, never mind.

[Jo498]

For me the trend seems fairly obvious in some genre fiction, I don't care about general averages. (I also think that such averages can be misleading with self-published ebooks and whatnot, so in effect the average is taken over a very different set than it would have been 20 years ago.)

If one looks at older fantasy trilogies or series, some were republished in omnibus volumes that are roughly the size of *one* of the bigger Tad Williams or George Martin books, e.g. LotR, Dragonlance, Shannara, Riddle-Master, Black Company, Taltos etc.

Now we have several fantasy series that got longer almost with any subsequent book, not only SoIaF but also Harry Potter (here the 5th is the longest, I believe, but 4-7 are all much longer than the first 3) and in these cases it was stuff that would sell anyway, regardless of sloppy editing etc.

Some of Abercrombie's and Hobb's could be easily 200 p novellas for what happens in them but they sprawl over 400+ pages.

in another Genre: A Stig Larsson brick is also at least twice the size of typical 1960s-80s thrillers by Ludlum, McLean etc.

[Werthead]

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In 2004, J.J. Abram's "LOST" TV series was one of the very first US series that was one continuous story. These kinds of series existed in other countries but for whatever reason were virtually non-existent in the US. When series were one story they would be known as "mini-series" or something like that.

Soap operas have been doing that since the 1950s, Hill Street Blues was doing it in 1981. Shows like The X-Files, Deep Space Nine and (very consciously) Babylon 5 were moving in that direction in the early 1990s. The structure of Lost derived, in part, from JJ Abrams' earlier show Alias. So it wasn't a particularly new move.

With regard to books, the longest books of all time are actually pretty old: Clarissa, War and Peace, Atlas Shrugged, A Dance to the Music of Time, Romance of the Three Kingdoms etc are all pre-1960. In terms of fantasy novels, the longest is To Green Angel Tower by Tad Williams (520,000 words), published in 1993. Ash: A Secret History, which is probably the second-longest (c.490,000 words), is just behind it and was published in 1999. Then you have Lord of the Rings (450,000 words), published in 1954-55.

The general trend in fantasy was for big-ish novels in the late 20th Century and then a dramatic move away from that in the early 21st Century. Even Robert Jordan seemed to get tired of writing very large novels and after The Shadow Rising and Lord of Chaos (both 390,000 words) pared things back dramatically. GRRM's A Storm of Swords and A Dance with Dragons (420,000 words each), Rothfuss's Wise Man's Fear (400,000 words, about 20,000 good ones) and Sanderson's Way of Kings and Words of Radiance (400,000 words) are very much outliers, resulting from them being established writers by that point. A brand-new fantasy author rocking up with a 400,000-word novel will simply be told to publish it in 2 or 3 volumes.

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To follow up on that Tolkien comment, I believe at least one of the ASOIAF books is longer than all of LotR put together.

Almost. ASoS is about 30,000 words shorter than all of LotR put together.

 

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I was always under the impression publishers preferred smaller books, cause stores preferred them because you could put more product on a shelf. Of course ebooks and amazon have probably fucked all that up.

 

Yes. Publishers are not keen on massive novels. They lose money, because they can't charge much more for a 1200-page novel than they can for a 400-page one but it costs them more in printing costs, and bookstores are less likely to put them on the stores for long when they can fit 2 or 3 smaller novels in the same footprint.

Ebooks have actually brought book sizes down: many self-published writers prefer to write novellas and get them out on sale ASAP. Longer self-published novels are relatively rare.

[Lord of Rhinos]

Serialized TV is, in general, superior to episodic TV.  Episodic TV, like say CSI, relies on the guest star(s) of the week to be the emotional core of the story (for the family members of the murdered victims this is the worst day of their lives, for the Crime Scene Investigators its another Monday), which is often ineffective because guest star roles are designed to be disposable (at the end of the episode the majority of guest stars ride off into the sun never to be seen again).  Serialized stories actually have stakes for the characters viewers care about (the regular cast).  Networks have traditionally steered clear of heavy serialization because even "regular" viewers typically only watched one out of every four episodes of a show and episodic shows played better in syndication.  With the rise of season long dvd box sets, streaming, and dvr devices, networks finally had an effective means of delivering serialized content to viewers.

[MorgulisMaximus]

15 hours ago, David Selig said:

The reason in the case of books is very obvious - computers and their text editing software. It's just much easier to write, edit, prepare for printing, etc. longer books. And in the case of ebooks large page count is no problem at all in terms of convenience of reading.

 

It would be cool if artificial intelligence could be harnessed to help authors. Then books would become so long that they would be impractical to read. Unless... books were made to go in alternate directions based the readers choice (i.e. a super-long "Choose your Own Adventure / Lone Wolf" type of book). 

[MorgulisMaximus]

15 hours ago, David Selig said:

Again the reason is obvious - now it's very easy to binge watch a whole season in a weekend and a 5 season series in two weeks with all the streaming/DVD options, and there are also a million recap sites if you have missed an episode or two and want to see what happened. Back in the early days of TV that wasn't the case.

 

That's a good way to read ASOIAF also... i.e. large portions of the later books in ASOIAF are quite slow. When readers reach slow parts they should just read the chapter summaries on the wiki pages and move on to the more interesting chapters. No need to torture yourself and read all of A Feast for Crows... yawn...

[MorgulisMaximus]

14 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Simple. The cost of producing books has been dropping ever since Gutenberg. Printed books were cheaper than getting a monk to transcribe it, until by the eighteenth century, mass-market novels were actually viable (incidentally, in the eighteenth century, novels were considered a low-brow competitor to poetry).

The trend continues today: it's easier to produce a book (with fewer constraints on length) than ever before. That the major publishers have spent decades cutting back on editorial staff at the expense of advertisement is a secondary (and much darker) cause.

Self-writing books... that's the future!